Ship Bottom

Ship Bottom, Long Beach Island, is a picturesque old name.
Thru' the years when neighbor towns changed names, it's stayed the same.

In eighteen seventeen, or thereabouts, it's written down
how once a ship, with bottom up, came floating near the town.
It was one of many shipwrecks in those early years;
the reasons early settlers formed life saving volunteers.

Captain Stephen Willets joined the service, as did most
of early Jersey citizens who'd settled near the coast.
Captain Willets, with his sloop and members of the crew,
patrolled the coast for vessels in distress when storms would brew.
'Tis said the captain had a penchant to search tirelessly,
often siding stranded ships when storms arose at sea.

One day, so the story goes, in thick and stormy weather,
the captain called the members of his faithful crew together.
They searched the length of Long Beach, while the ocean rolled and tossed,
but all in vain; they found no signs that any ship was lost.
His crew, distraught and weary, were heading back to land;
their captain's orders to keep on were hard to understand.
But he had heard an inner voice that he could not ignore,
impelling him, "Keep searching, perhaps closer to the shore."
And so they manned a smaller boat, and hadn't gone too far;
they spied a ship's hull, bottom up, pounding on the bar.
As they pulled alongside, they heard, "tap, tap, tap" inside;
"Some poor soul is trapped within that hull," the captain cried.
Not having brought an instrument, the men retraced their tracks,
returning quickly to the sloop and bringing back an axe.
Carefully, they chopped the plank thru', just in time to save
the lone survivor, a young woman, from a watery grave.

They made attempts to guess the length of time she'd been afloat,
as they pried her desperate fingers from the hull to which she'd clung.
And, tho', in shocked condition, when they helped her in their boat,
she expressed her thanks by gesture, for she spoke in foreign tongue.
It saddened them to learn that she had been the captain's wife.
They shared her fear that like the others, he had lost his life.
The sympathetic crew consoled the woman for her loss,
and when they landed her on shore, she knelt, and marked a cross.

Where the woman came from, to this day's a mystery.
She left, not knowing of her part in Long Beach history.
Our pioneer forefathers served without a thought of fame -
but we can be reminded by Ship Bottom's grand old name.

-Lillian Arnold Lopez "Pineylore"

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